


Still Toll the Bells of Val Royeaux

by Ganymeme



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Origins
Genre: Gen, Minor Character Death, Other: See Story Notes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-31
Updated: 2017-10-31
Packaged: 2019-01-27 00:30:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 355
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12569636
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ganymeme/pseuds/Ganymeme
Summary: Leliana, between the events of DA:O and her cameo in DA2. Also birds, flowers, letter-writing, and a murder.





	Still Toll the Bells of Val Royeaux

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Aubergion](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Aubergion).



> I did not flag for death, violence, or sexual assault because the topics are far more implied than explicit, and in only 355 words, at that. But heads up, those topics are below.

When Leliana returned to Val Royeaux, she did not return to the fine inns and quaint cafés of la Promenade des Fleurs. She took instead a room in the dwarven quarter, by the docks. It was a tiny, cramped attic room squeezed in under the eaves next to the pigeon loft, but she was as far from the ceaseless ringing of the bells as she could be and still be in the city.

There the hours crawled by, syrup-slow. She had thought to write, or sing, but words would not come, so she watched. She watched the birds from her window and the people from the street-café beside the inn. She sat and she watched and she felt herself fading, fading into the grey stones and grey sea.

It was the watching that solved the murder, in the end. A young flower-seller, who only ever sold flowers despite what that Marcher sailor thought, did not arrive on her corner one morning. Leliana had watched, day after day, as the sailor lingered and leered. She had not seen the initial rebuff happen, but she read it in the flower-seller’s tight shoulders and the man’s baleful stare.

The letter came three days after the murder, addressed to “Leliana, Sr. Proclamée”  in an elegant, familiar hand. _Come,_ it coaxed, _be by my side, and bring Her light to the darkness_.

She had not read the depths of the man’s violence. That failure was, perhaps, what sent the cold spears of doubt piercing into her heart when they found the flower-seller’s body. Her throat was slit; her skirt, in tatters. Three year ago, Leliana had helped end a Blight. An evil more epic, by bard’s measure. It was a victory grand and vast in its hollowness when faced with a cart of withering flowers.

A week and two funerals passed before she sent her answer. The funerals could not have been more different: one a grand affair, an ecstasy of mourning such as only Val Royeaux could perform. The other was nearly anonymous, a body returned to the Stone below the sea.

 _Yes,_ Leliana wrote, _I will be there_.


End file.
